Chrome definitely doesn't have any level of domination over the enterprise market like IE6 on Windows did. That was the problem with IE6 not the browser per se - it was revolutionary when it was released, MS just killed the team. The chance that enterprises will stick with Chrome is very unlikely.
As it stands at the moment, the only downside is the duplicated development between the Safari and Chrome teams. Webkit will suffer, but the web won't. Apple don't care enough, the web isn't the top of their priority list.
If anything, the iOS monopoly of mobile web traffic (in the first world) is a problem which certainly isn't changed by this fork.
That's my two pennies worth.
Then I stopped sucking and looked up stuff from the article.
Blink is a part of the chromium project, and is equivalently open[fn:0]. So that means it's equivalent to any other open source fork.
Mailing list drama, duplicating technical work, etc will happen but hopefully this will contribute to having even more high quality open web implementations available.
[fn:0] http://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq#TOC-Is-this-goin...
If you're doing anything more complicated than serving static HTML and images to mobile devices you will already need to test on as many different devices as is feasible for you. It's basically unheard of for something to work across all WebKit based browsers just because your CI is telling you it works OK in desktop Chrome.
"We're not sharing our stuff anymore as it's costing too much".
A the risk of sounding like a paranoid nutbag, with stuff like NaCl, SPDY, Dart etc, it sounds like Google have their own agenda.
http://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq#TOC-Is-this-goin...
I was concerned that Blink would only be open-source retro-actively, like Android, but this is a good sign.
It's all about who has control of the codebase. If you need to fork or kiss Google's ass to implement changes to it, then it's not really open.
To put it better, it might still be "open source" but it's not a community or a multi-company project.
I would fully expect that a company would have its own agenda. Google's is/was organizing the world's information. It's a bit, um, something, to expect that they don't have an agenda, ne?
Why would you build the tool to organize the world's information on top of a platform designed to serve a single vendor rather than the user and consumer of the technology?
Google are playing a little game here similar to the antics Microsoft got up to in the early '00s.
All it takes is some level of adoption and then a diversion away from this and all the other vendors spend forever playing catch up, forcing market dominance.
To make web pages load fast and web apps run fast?
All these are as well:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104.aspx
Would you consider building on top of them? No because they are not 100% vendor neutral. They serve the vendor, not the consumers of the technology.
Ahah so much hypocrisy condensed in this sentence. Yeah it's constraining to share code and have compile time #defines but if every vendor did the same there wouldn't be any common project.
Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...
No, we (the companies) don't.
We work to get web features that we can leverage.
If we can get away with them being adopted by everybody but solely controlled by us, it's all the merrier. If we can get away with keeping some features to ourselves as a competitive advantage ditto.
If we can push our agenda and standards instead of collaborating and iterating faster on common ones, that's great too.
We (the companies) could care less about the web, in any way in which it doesn't affect our bottom line.
In fact, if we have to stall the Web's progress to protect some of our own investments and offerings, we're all for it.
Also, if we have to stall the Web's progress just to avoid some competitor getting his stuff adopted and standardized first, we're all for it.
WhatWG was formed because the W3C design by committee approach was too slow for some businesses to gain an advantage.
W3C is a paid up list of various exchange top 500 companies who can afford to pay up for standards.
It's a giant pissing match.
Edit: I didn't know I replied to a Google employee, just s/Google/your company/ in my post.
all you have to look at is the history of html5 and even the issues surrounding things like video to see what its like to decide by committee.
WHATWG published the First Public Working Draft of the specification on 22 January 2008
In May 2011, the working group advanced HTML5 to "Last Call
As of May 2012, the specification is back to Working Draft state at the W3C
In September 2012, the W3C proposed a plan[28] to release a stable HTML5 Recommendation by the end of 2014
Opera used Webkit because they had no choice. It was that or dying.
Google forks webkit because even thus they have a massive control over it, they don't have _enough_ control.
There are still things other contributors refuse loud enough. Well, like Dart. Or the implementation of Webkit2. Or what not.
Since Google has the major browser marketshare, they're like "wait a moment, we're the masters of the game here, why the fuck can't we just dictate the rules? it's our browser that's mainly running this."
Well, now, there will be zero barrier to this. Not even disagreements.
So.. it is a quite different thing indeed.
The other intents Google have are good, but unfortunately, I'm near certain the REAL interest is the one I and others listed: CONTROL. FULL CONTROL. Things will inevitably go that way. Even if some devs working on Chromium are fooled right now. There is no way you don't get this without making Chromium an entity fully separated from Google, and that ain't happening.
...Or was your post satirizing the generic "Google did a thing! They're evil now!" posts? I'm sometimes bad at detecting irony.
Sometimes forking is necessary, even in open source projects, some party feels the majority or the leaders of that open source project take it into a wrong direction. That's what happened to LibreOffice, too.
1. That you propose a draft specification
2. That you're willing to discuss it with other implementors
3. That you've exhausted all other options
So let's take the example of Dart, and let's say every other browser engine says "no" to Dart. This policy seems to allow you to act unilaterally, against current interoperability, in this case as long as you put some indeterminate amount of effort to convince other implementors.
Is that a correct reading of it? If so, what good is the rest of the policy about striving for compatibility with other engines when you've given yourself an out when consensus doesn't fall your way?
"the costs of sharing code now outweighed the advantages"
Does that mean Google will only be a good open source citizen as long as it is advantageous to them and on a project-by-project basis?
Edit: Well it is part of Chromium, which is open source, so maybe I was too rash.
While that is partially true, Google Chrome also has a very strong business strategy behind it.
Right now it is the main distribution channel for Google Search. Every download of the browser is converted (with a probability, of course) to more searches or to a switch-over from another search engine.
For quite a long time (several years) search engine quality has not been selling itself. Many people do not notice any real difference between Bing/Baidu/Yandex/Seznam and Google.
Google invented search distribution with Google Toolbar (which was a tremendous success from business side) and right now Google Chrome is the new Google Toolbar. One of the main KPIs for Google Chrome product is Google Search market share. Specifically they directly optimize for Google Search share from inside Google Chrome which when multiplied by the share of the browser converts into money.
Just wanted to clarify things, sorry if not mentioning Blink made this comment an off-topic one.
On my 2GB netbook, chrome has gone from my preferred browser to unusable due to the high memory footprint of recent builds. I wonder if this cleanup will help get the memory down to something reasonable like the level it was before Chrome 10.
